Thursday, November 10, 2016

In
Jakarta violence between protestors and police broke out Friday night,
November 4, 2016 when an estimated 200,000 Muslims emerged from Friday
prayers in mosques to rally outside the Indonesian President’s
palace. Clashes with police led to tear gas being used on demonstrators,
and Indonesia’s president, Joko Widodo, had to postpone his planned
visit to Australia to deal with the crisis.

The
crowd was calling for the arrest of Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, known as
Ahok, the Chinese Christian governor of Jakarta, which is Indonesia’s
capital and the largest city in the world’s fourth most populous
nation.

A
video had gone viral showing Ahok referring in a speech to chapter 5,
verse 51 of the Qur’an. He warned his listeners not to give credence to
those who might try to deceive them with this verse or others like it.

Ahok
has faced criticism before from hardline Muslims, who objected when he
stood as Deputy Governor of Jakarta in 2012. Yet Ahok is very popular,
and seems set to win the next gubernatorial election in February
2017. He previously took office as Governor in 2014 after Joko Widodo
resigned his position as Jarkarta mayor to take up the Presidency of the
nation.

Muslims opposed to Ahok had been citing verse 5:51 from the Qur’an to try to delegitimize his candidacy. The verse reads:

You
who believe! Do not take the Jews and Christians as allies. They are
allies of each other. Whoever of you takes them as allies is already one
of them. Surely Allah does not guide the people who are evildoers. (5:51)

The word translated here as allies (Arabic) awliya,
is ambiguous. It can mean ‘allies’, but also ‘patrons’ or ‘guardians’.
The rejection of dependence upon disbelievers is emphasized repeatedly
in the Qur’an (e.g. in verses 3:28 and 4:141, 144). In Indonesian
translations of the verse 5:51 is rendered ‘do not take Jews and
Christians as your leaders (pemimpin-pemimpinmu)’.

Ibn Kathir, an authoritative medieval commentator on the Qur’an, explained this verse as follows:

Allah
forbids his believing servants from having Jews and Christians as
allies or patrons, because they are the enemies of Islam and its people,
may Allah curse them.

The
immediately preceding verse, 5:50, urges Muslims not to seek the
‘judgment of the time of ignorance’. In explaining this, Ibn Kathir
denounces anyone who follows man-made laws instead of laws revealed by
Allah. Such a person:

is
a disbeliever who deserves to be fought against (i.e. to be killed),
until he reverts to Allah’s and His Messenger’s decisions, so that no
law, minor or major, is referred to except by His Law.

Ibn
Kathir is insisting that the only valid form of legislation is the
Islamic sharia, that only Muslims can rule, and any Muslim who looks to
non-Muslims for political or legal direction is an infidel. According to
verse 5:51, such a person is already ‘one of them’: in other words,
they have to be considered an infidel too, and have apostasized from
Islam, for which the penalty is death.

The
admonition to Muslims not to take non-Muslims, and especially
Christians or Jews, as allies or leaders is orthodox, mainstream Islamic
teaching. In the light of this, it is disappointing that the Australian
Age newspaper’s Indonesian correspondent, Jewel Topsfield, offers the following gloss:

“some
interpret [verse 5:51] as prohibiting Muslims from living under the
leadership of a non-Muslim. Others say the scripture should be
understood in its context — a time of war — and not interpreted
literally.”

It
may be true that a few contemporary moderate voices may say this verse
should not be taken literally, but this is certainly not the mainstream
view of centuries of Islamic jurisprudence.

The
Muslim aversion to non-Muslim political leadership has many outworkings
around the world. In Egypt Christians make up around 10% of the
population, but less than 1.5% of the parliament is Christian. For
decades there had been no Christian governors for any of Egypt’s 27
governorates, until Mubarak appointed Major General Emad Mikhail as
governor over Qena. However massive protests broke out after imams
preached sermons in Qena mosques teaching that God does not permit
Christians to have authority over Muslims. Demonstrators marched the
streets crying, 'A Muslim governor in a Muslim country' and 'There is no
god but Allah and Christians are the enemies of Allah' The protests led
to the governor’s appointment being temporarily suspended in order to
reestablish the order.

Ahok’s
position is difficult. Since his opponents were unable to discredit him
politically for being a Christian, they are now upping the ante by
accusing him of blasphemy instead, demanding that the state launch legal
proceedings against him. In Ahok’s speech, he had brushed aside those
who were citing 5:51 against him, saying they were telling lies. In fact
he made no comment on the Qur’an itself, apart from implying that a
particular interpretation was false. His offense was to criticize the
misuse of the text by others for political purposes. Yet this gave
enough leeway for a vast crowd to be inflamed against him.

There is a famous hadith or tradition of Muhammad, which states:

Whoever
sees an evil, let him change it with his hand; and if he is not able to
do so, then with his tongue; and if he is not able to do so, then with
his heart — and that is the weakest of faith.

This
is interpreted by many to mean that a Muslim must use the highest level
of force available to remove something evil. The protestors in Jakarta
were exercising their religious duty by speaking out against a Christian
being in political authority over a 95% Muslim city, using his alleged
blasphemy as a trigger point. Some went further than just words,
threatening action ‘with the hand’: former terrorist Nasir Abas, turned
police consultant, carried a sign saying ‘Punish Ahok or our bullets
will'.

The
phenomenon of Muslims taking political or legal processes into their
own hands is widespread. An example was the offer made by Pakistani Imam
Maulana Yusuf of a bounty of $6,000 to anyone who would murder Asia
Bibi, a young Christian woman on death row for a trumped-up blasphemy
offense. Recently Muslim activists have been conducting mass public
protests across Pakistan calling for Bibi to be lynched. 'It will be a
war if accursed Asia escapes', said Mukhtar, one of the protestors in
Lahore.

Another
example comes from the UK in 2009, when Geert Wilders was invited to a
private meeting at the House of Lords in London. In response Lord Nazir
Ahmed, a Muslim peer, threatened to personally mobilize 10,000 Muslim
protestors to physically prevent Wilders from entering the House.

Muslims
taking the law into their own hands to act against non-Muslims who rise
to high political office is not a new phenomenon. Egypt’s only
Christian Prime Minister was Boutros Ghali, who served from 1908. He was
the grandfather of the former UN Secretary General, Boutros
Boutros-Ghali. He was assassinated in 1910 by a European-educated
Egyptian Muslim, Ibrahim Nassif Boutros Ghali -Wardani.

An
example from further back in history was the crucifixion of Joseph Ibn
Naghrela, vizier of Granada, by a Muslim mob in 1066, as well as a
pogrom against the Jewishpopulation.Although Joseph had been appointed
to his high office by a Muslim king, Badis al-Muzaffar, local Muslims
resented having a Jew in authority over them. The Muslim jurist Abu
Ishaq wrote a diatribe to incite the violence, arguing that non-Muslims’
blood was no longer protected under the terms of their covenant (of
surrender), since they had risen to a position of authority over
Muslims:

Do
not consider it a breach of faith to kill them — the breach would be to
let them carry on. They have violated our covenant with them, so how
can you be held guilty against the violators? How can they have any pact
when we are obscure and they are prominent.

Indonesia
is often held up as a model of a moderate Muslim-majority nation. Its
constitution is not Islamic and many Indonesian Muslims espouse moderate
views. However the global Islamist movement has nevertheless made
strong inroads in this the most populous Muslim nation. Undoubtedly it
will be a landmark test for Indonesia’s tolerance whether Ahok is
permitted to continue in office. Those Muslims who are raising both
their voices and their hands to protest against him will not be easily
silenced.

This
outbreak of intolerance bodes ill for Indonesia’s future. Governor Ahok
is being supported by significant Muslim leaders. GP Ansor, the former
chairman of the largest Indonesian Youth organization called the
complaints a ‘hoax’, and politician Nusron Wahid stated that Ahok had
said nothing to insult Islam. For his part, Governor Ahok has apologized
to Muslims, saying, 'To Muslims who felt insulted, I apologize. I had
no intention to insult Islam'. He stated that 'Religion is a very
personal matter and should not be mixed up with public discourse'.
However his Muslim opponents clearly hold a different view about the
place of Islam in public life!

Ahok
is being questioned this week by the police, pending a possible charge
of blasphemy. The thought that an Indonesian court might find Ahok
guilty of such a charge is troubling. To do so would require proof that
Ahok intended to incite hatred against Muslims, defame Islam or incite
apostasy. The prosecution might argue that in pooh-poohing the
legitimate and well-established Islamic prohibition against non-Muslims
taking authority over Muslims, he was denigrating the religion. Even if
no charges are laid, Ahok will certainly come under very great political
pressure to withdraw his candidacy.

In
Indonesia today it is apparently unacceptable to some Muslims that a
prominent Christian might express an opinion about what the Qur’an says.
Yet the same Muslims claim the right to stridently disallow this
Christian candidacy for political office, based on the very same Quranic
passage. This is supremacist reasoning, which incites hatred while
denying the object of hatred any voice in the matter. If this
intolerance is given credence by the Indonesian police and courts, it
bodes very ill indeed for the nation’s future.

Yet
the greater concern is a question for us all: Does the Islamic sharia
permit non-Muslims to live alongside Muslims as equals in one
world? This is a crucial question, not just for Indonesia, but for
Europe, for America, indeed for every nation with more than a tiny
minority of Muslim citizens. According to the hundreds of thousands
protesting in the streets of Jakarta this week, the answer to this
question is a resolute and loud 'No!'

Dr. Mark Durie is
an academic, human rights activist, Anglican pastor, a
Shillman-Ginsburg Writing Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct
Research Fellow of the Arthur Jeffery Centre for the Study of Islam at
Melbourne School of Theology.

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About Me

Dr Mark Durie is an academic, human rights activist, pastor, Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, and Adjunct Research Fellow of the Arthur Jeffery Centre of the Melbourne School of Theology. He has published many articles and books on the language and culture of the Acehnese, Christian-Muslim relations and religious freedom. Holding a PhD in Linguistics from Australian National University and a ThD in Quranic Theology from the Australian College of Theology, he has held visiting appointments at the University of Leiden, MIT, UCLA and Stanford, and was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1992.